AviationTown

Aviation Town is a mobile educational and entertainment event that the "Lotnicze Marzenia" Foundation brings directly to municipalities and towns across Poland. The idea is simple: if children from smaller towns cannot travel to aviation fairs or visit aviation museums, then aviation comes to them.

At the heart of every Aviation Town are mobile flight simulators. These are not fairground rides — they are professional simulation stations where participants take the controls and perform real flight manoeuvres: take-off, en-route flight and approach to landing. The screen in front of them shows a realistic cockpit view, while an instructor stands beside them and explains each step. For a child who has never seen a cockpit up close, those few minutes on the simulator are an experience that stays with them for a long time.

But Aviation Town is far more than simulators. A whole workshop area grows up around them, where young people can experience aviation from many sides. At the navigation station, participants plan a flight route on a real ICAO chart — they mark waypoints, calculate distances and check which airspaces along the way require clearance. At the meteorology station, they learn to read weather charts the way pilots do — they identify fronts, check whether conditions allow a flight, and discover why cumulus clouds mean turbulence. At the modelling station, they build simple aircraft models from balsa wood and paper, testing the principles of aerodynamics in practice — which wing shape flies further, which is more stable, why a tail is needed to keep on course.

Every station is run by someone who can talk about aviation with passion — Foundation volunteers, aviation students, local pilots who want to inspire the next generation. These are not formal lessons. They are conversations, demonstrations and shared experiments — all in an atmosphere that turns learning into an adventure.

The format of the event is flexible and adapts to what the municipality can offer. Aviation Town can take over a school gym, a fire station hall, a sports hall or the square in front of the town hall on a warm weekend. It can run for one day or two. It can be aimed at a single school or open to the whole community. The Foundation tailors the scale and programme to local needs and conditions — the only requirements are space and the will to invite aviation to your town.

Why do we do this? Because in Poland there are thousands of towns where a child's only contact with aviation is the sight of a plane in the sky. No aviation museums nearby, no flying clubs with children's programmes, no events where you can sit at the controls — even virtual ones. Aviation Town breaks that barrier. It comes to places aviation has never reached before, and gives young people a chance to make first contact with an industry that is growing in Poland faster than ever.

Every edition of Aviation Town is also an impulse for the local community. Parents come with their children and discover for themselves that a flight simulator is not just fun — it is a window onto a world where their children might one day work. Local teachers see how physics, geography and mathematics can be taught in a way that really engages students. And the municipality gains an event that people talk about — because Aviation Town is not just another talk, it is an experience that makes an impression.

The "Lotnicze Marzenia" Foundation runs Aviation Towns regularly, visiting one municipality after another across Poland. Every event is documented, and the experience gained feeds back into the programme. Our goal is for Aviation Town to visit dozens of towns over the next few years — and for at least one child in each of them to say after our visit: "I want to fly".